Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

15 INFECTION CONTROL CDC to create hospital worker vaccination dashboard By Kelly Gooch T he CDC will publish preliminary acute care hospital staff COVID-19 vaccination data in a dashboard "in the near future," although the exact date is still to be determined, the agency confirmed to Becker's on March 24. The data will be on COVID-19 vaccination — including pri- mary series and additional/booster doses — among work- ers of CMS-certified acute care hospitals. This data will be updated weekly and include staff on payroll, licensed independent practitioners (physicians, advanced practice nurses and physician assistants), adult students/trainees and volunteers and other contract workers, the CDC said. Data will not be broken down by staff type or state. Per a CMS rule, CMS-certified acute care hospitals must report quarterly staff vaccination coverage data to the CDC, with the first submission from hospitals, for data from Oct. 1-Dec. 31, 2021, due on May 16, the CDC said. The deadline for reporting data covering January-March 2022 is August 2022. Subsequently, quarterly submis- sions are required. CMS said earlier in March that it will not release quar- terly data on the number of hospital workers vaccinated against COVID-19 and instead will release a full year of the data in October. The CMS data will be at the facility level. n It could take years to know what 'endemic COVID-19' looks like By Cailey Gleeson I t can take years for scientists to determine endemic patterns while pandemics settle, and consequences of widespread illness can be long lasting aer new infections fade, leaving the endemic stage of COVID-19 a "mystery," e New York Times reported April 7. "ere's been a political reframing of the idea of endemic as some- thing that is harmless or normal," Lukas Engelmann, PhD, a histo- rian of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told the Times. Dr. Engelmann added that epidemiologists use the term for condi- tions that should be watched carefully, as endemic diseases have the potential to become epidemics again. Many scientists predict the endemic stage of COVID-19 will be sim- ilar to other respiratory viruses, but the burdens of endemic diseases are "unequal," according to experts who spoke with the Times, as communities' experiences with diseases oen differ. "It will be no more deadly than seasonal flu or may be mild like one of the cold-causing coronaviruses," Lone Simonsen, PhD, the director of the PandemiX Center at Roskilde University in Denmark, told the Times. Immunity from vaccination and infection may wane over time, and the random mutation of future variants may cause severe disease. One thing is certain, according to the Times: A disease making the transition to an endemic state does not indicate the end of that disease. Countries must use control measures, such as testing and vaccinations, to keep diseases from becoming epidemics again. n Shortest known gap between COVID-19 infections? 20 days, researchers say By Cailey Gleeson T wenty days is the shortest known gap between COVID-19 infections in a single patient, research from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases found. Researchers are set to present a case report on a 31-year- old fully vaccinated woman in Spain who was infected with COVID-19 twice in less than three weeks. She first tested positive on Dec. 20 after receiving a booster shot 12 days prior. She was asymptomatic and self-isolated for 10 days. On Jan. 12, she tested positive for COVID-19 again. Whole genome sequencing showed the patient, a health- care worker, had been infected by two different strains of COVID-19. The first infection was with the delta variant while the second was with the omicron variant. "This case highlights the potential of the omicron variant to evade the previous immunity acquired either from a natural infection with other variants or from vaccines," said Gemma Recio, MD, one of the study's authors. "In other words, people who have had COVID-19 cannot as- sume they are protected against reinfection, even if they have been fully vaccinated." The researchers' findings were presented at European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseas- es in Lisbon, Portugal, April 23-26. n

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